Best practices, updated every other Wednesday

March 29, 2017

Six law firms take legal project management just-in-time training to the next level

Six leading law firms have recently started to take their legal project management (LPM) programs to the next level by purchasing licenses to LegalBizDev’s new library of online LPM tools and templates which lawyers can access on their laptop, tablet, or phone. The six firms are:

Winston & Strawn – an international law firm with more than 875 attorneys in 17 offices in key financial centers around the world. Its largest office is in Chicago.

Steptoe – an international firm with more than 500 lawyers and other professionals in offices in Beijing, Brussels, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, Phoenix, and its main office in Washington, DC.

Lathrop & Gage – a US firm with over 300 lawyers in 11 offices from Boston to Los Angeles, with its main office in Kansas City, Missouri.

Stewart McKelvey – a Canadian law firm with more than 200 lawyers in six offices throughout the Atlantic region of Canada. Its largest office is in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt – a firm with over 150 lawyers in seven cities in the Pacific Northwest. Its main office is in Portland, Oregon.

Bilzin Sumberg – a Miami-based firm with more than 100 lawyers, serving clients throughout the United States and around the world.

Based on our experiences using these templates with over 100 law firms, LegalBizDev consultants are working with each license holder to create a strategic plan that fits each firm’s unique culture and resources, including tasks, objectives, and timelines to assure that lawyers use these tools. The results they achieve will be described in this blog in coming months.

The concept of just-in-time training is old news in most professions. For example, when people need to use an unfamiliar feature of Microsoft Word, very few would consider taking a class or looking it up in a book. They simply find the exact information they need in online help, precisely when they need it.

But the adoption of just-in-time training techniques has been slower in the conservative legal profession. Law firms love precedents, and many did not begin to think seriously about legal project management (LPM) until 2010 when Dechert, a firm with over 800 lawyers, announced that they had held traditional training classes with all their partners in this emerging field. This led to a wave of imitation, with numerous firms conducting training classes, then publishing press releases announcing their success.

There was just one problem with all of these traditional classes: few lawyers actually changed their behavior and applied the principles they learned in class. As the chair of one AmLaw 200 firm told me in an interview for my book Client Value and Law Firm Profitability, “Every shareholder and top level associate [at our firm] has had a full day of project management training. I’d like to tell you they use it, but they don’t (p. 180).”

Long-term readers of this blog know that LegalBizDev has, from the very start of the LPM movement, maintained that the best way to change behavior is for motivated attorneys to directly experience immediate LPM benefits and then become internal champions who spread the word. The most efficient way for lawyers to experience those benefits is to work one-on-one with a personal coach. This is one type of just-in-time training, since it uses the tools and templates in our Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide to focus on each lawyer’s immediate needs. Our web page includes several case studies showing exactly how this approach has worked.

But until recently, the piece of the puzzle that’s been missing has been an extensive library of online LPM tools which lawyers can access anytime, anywhere. It is time consuming and costly to develop and test LPM tools and templates, so to date the only available online tools have been limited to a few templates created by individual firms.

LegalBizDev has now taken the next step in the just-in-time training approach by offering licenses to use electronic versions not just of the tools and templates published in the fourth edition of the Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide, but also of additional new tools and templates that we will continue to develop and release every three months. These tools and templates make it possible for lawyers to better plan budgets, define scope for new matters, improve client communications, and improve efficiency in other areas by simply looking up what they need when they need it. Our goal is to create the single definitive online resource for the latest information on LPM and to keep adding to it as the field grows.

Instead of paying to reinvent the wheel, these six law firms and others that license these materials in the future will start from a proven foundation of what’s worked at other firms, and what hasn’t, based on six years of development, research, and testing with over 100 law firms.

As soon as just one lawyer who is responsible for a large engagement accesses the right information at the right moment, the return on investment will quickly exceed cost by:

Increasing the accuracy of an initial fee estimate and the likelihood of payment in full by using the template “15 questions to ask clients to help define scope”

Renegotiating a fixed fee by using the template “Prepare and negotiate for approval of a scope change”

Using any of the more than 150 tools and templates in this electronic library to increase client satisfaction and/or firm profitability

For more information on licensing these materials for your firm, contact us (info@legalbizdev.com, 617-217-2578) for details, including the introductory discounts we are offering through June 30, 2017.